[Updated] Thanks to polygenelubricants's reply, the real problem is the exception from the method getCanonicalPath() because I cannot include try-catch-loop there.

$ cat StartingPath.java 
import java.util.*;
import java.io.*;

public class StartingPath {
 public static final String startingPath = (new File(".")).getCanonicalPath();

 public static void main(String[] args){
  System.out.println(startingPath);
 }
}
$ javac StartingPath.java 
StartingPath.java:5: unreported exception java.io.IOException; must be caught or declared to be thrown
 public static final String startingPath = (new File(".")).getCanonicalPath();
                                                                           ^
1 error